Of course this doesn’t mean ‘every thought my mind has about my body’s responses is a true fact’.
However…
In the ‘embodiment’ community there’s a lot of talk about ‘trusting your body’.
At the same time there is simultaneously a hierarchy of which responses & emotions are ‘more true’, and a lot of demonization of our fear responses.
People often dismiss their experiences (or have their experiences dismissed by others) as “just my fear talking”, in order to indicate that what they are experiencing is not really valid or worth taking seriously.
In this way, people override their bodily experience for the sake of pushing through and doing something anyway.
While I understand the purpose of this, I worry about applying it to every scenario where we experience fear or concern, because it teaches us to ignore our intuitive bodily responses.
And if we want to actually learn how to trust our bodies – we need to listen first, rather than automatically dismissing, or getting caught in a cycle of doubt & perseverating about the validity of every feeling we have.
This I Know To Be True: Every response of our body has wisdom.
I believe there is more value in becoming intimate with our responses – by being curious about them – rather than in trying to determine which somatic response is “better” so that we can dismiss the other(s).
We spend so much time teasing apart our unconscious responses to discover what the “true” response is vs. the “habit” response, purely so that we can dismiss the habit response – but what if we fostered more curiosity around all our responses – even habit, or ‘trauma’ responses?
An important element of engaging more deeply with our bodily & emotional responses is to bring more awareness to the mechanism that you use to question yourself. This is actually the exact same mechanism that generates self-doubt, so if we let ourselves get caught up in questioning where our experience is coming from, we can sometimes be feeding the self-doubting mechanism too.
The deepest self-trust comes from trusting the innate wisdom of our animal bodies, without needing to make up stories about what those responses mean.
Read more → HERE
